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That said, I don't see how this is different than what Google has on their hands. Even FB shuts down fake accounts (which I don't really see happening with any regularity) those seeking anonymity are only slightly inconvenienced. Besides, FB doesn't need your approval to get you to like things anyway. They've even been doing it to dead people.

The reason Facebook wants your real name is because they want to market things to you and it makes it easier.

If you give them a fake name, then they have to go through the trouble of finding your real name from anyone you communicate with. Use facebook on a cell phone? Do your friends? Then facebook already knows your real name. [guardian.co.uk]

To them, you are confirmed as a real user by being cross referenced by your friend's contact books. Keep your silly alias.

Yeah, I can see it makes things easier if they want to market to me OFFLINE, to know my OFFLINE identity and location. But they offer NO VALUE to me to use an ONLINE service unless I am using my ONLINE identity. There are plenty of others that do, and they are not so full of spammers and other idios, so I see no benefit to me to bother with Facebook unless they allow my REAL identity.

How easy it is to enforce the policy is irrelevant. The question is whether the policy should be allowed to exist at all, from a legal standpoint.

Personally I don't see why it shouldn't, if you're going to make use of a service, the person offering it should be allowed to know who it is they're offering the service to. So long as it's made clear what's being done with the information at hand there doesn't seem to be any legitimate reason to disallow it.

Personally I don't see why it shouldn't, if you're going to make use of a service, the person offering it should be allowed to know who it is they're offering the service to. So long as it's made clear what's being done with the information at hand there doesn't seem to be any legitimate reason to disallow it.

I agree. Especially when it's a completely FREE service! No one is forcing anyone to be on Facebook. I'm not on Facebook and I don't wish I was.

Exactly - I despise facebook and all they stand for, but the idea that national law can intervene on whether or not a website can allow/deny pseudonyms is even more distasteful. It's their website, they can lay down their own naming policy.

The thing I object to is the creation of shadow accounts where they gather data on people who want nothing to do with facebook simply by extrapolating from the data of friends who are on the network. I'm not on facebook because I don't want to be on facebook, they sh

There are so many people breaking the law on my street, how will the insert strange and/or unreasonable law be enforced? You can do anything you want if you are smart, and get away with it. That is what I have noticed anyway.

Fixed that for you. Just for the record, you have broken more laws than mitzvots. Doesn't make them any less ridiculous.

But did you use a real sounding made up name, or an obvious false name? It makes a big difference. Heavily salting FB with a massive number of plausible soundings fake people is how we can take the zucking leviathan down.

Wonderful. Can you guarantee that I'll receive packages addressed to "Zon Mindless" rather than "Zontar T. Mindless" because many if not most Swedes apparently cannot handle the concept of short forms of long first names?

I find it rather unlikely that Facebook could find out your real name if you didn't give it to them and also didn't provide any ways for them to find it. They have virtually no chance of finding out your real ip address unless you seriously give it to them.

I want to use the name I use online so people WILL know who I am. This is not anonymity... people have figured out my "human world" identity. The name "Skapare" is my SOCIAL identity. Facebook is a SOCIAL site. So they should WANT me to use my social identity.

I am autistic. I have a job, and some people at my workplace very quickly identified that I was autistic. But some apparently haven't.

Online, I can anonymously post about issues in my life, things that I've done that I now understand would cause problems or confusion for other people, et cetera. With sites having "real name" policies, that is immediately lost. If I had to use my real name, there are so many things I could not disclose, because of the certainty of discrimination. If people knew some of the things which I've done they might think that I was a risk to myself, and with the last mass shooter supposedly being autistic, if people knew that I was autistic they might think that I was a risk to others. I am not; I am actually about the least violent person I've ever met.

I don't use Facebook, but there is no way that real name policies are helpful. They are very harmful. I am not the only person who has such reasons to want to maintain anonymity. And even though I know that certain information can immediately be looked up(things like IP addresses or relative locations), the internet does grant some anonymity. It's not that I am a criminal; I haven't done anything wrong. It's that I am someone who has been victimized, and I don't want to be further victimized. Insisting that if I wish to maintain anonymity I should avoid social sites is similar to the way I was ostracized when I attempted socialization when I was younger.

As the grandparent post said, the real name policy is not the issue here though. Facebook is simply not the place for anonymous or private chatter. It's a site that should at all times, real name policy or not, be treated as a massive public forum. Not using Facebook is absolutely a solution, and even if you DO you use Facebook, you should stay aware that everything on it may as well be public information.

So in that sense it's not the place to post about issues in your life.There's other, anonymous and/o

This is clearly the case for Google+ and Facebook. Twitter seems to allow online-only "avatar" registrations as long as you have an email address (and I have billions and billions of those). I have more than one twitter account.

Yeah, in that sense twitter can certainly be used semi-anonymously. But one should remember that it is still effectively a gigantic public forum (As is/.), and no matter the name you're using, if you talk about things directly related to your life (Such as employment) you may identifiable.

(Unlike the 90% of users who seems to think FB should somehow be private whenever they just happen to want it to be.)

I've been in the public eye for 20+ years. When you live and work in the Bible Belt, you do not talk about your fondness for Scotch whiskey on your radio show. Unless you want the whole tri-county area to know about it. Which, if you want your ratings to remain viable, you

Insisting that if I wish to maintain anonymity I should avoid social sites is similar to the way I was ostracized when I attempted socialization when I was younger.

Yes, the real name policy is idiotic, but you shouldn't "avoid social sites" because of it. You should just be careful about what you disclose on social sites (just like everybody else should too). There is no reason you can't have one login for social sites and a different login for other bulletin boards.

That's how real life works too. Everybody has multiple layers of identities. And everybody practices different levels of self-disclosure based on the different persons they're talking to.

You say he should just be careful what he discloses... You are failing to see the problem. Until he's had a lot of experience with a new social situation, he doesn't know what is acceptable and what isn't. And even then, that doesn't mean he understands WHY. Combined with the fact that he can't fully erase any actions or statements he makes online after making them, that leaves avoiding that media altogether or remaining anonymous. You are telling him to do the thing he has problems doing to begin with.

I've met some extremely high functioning autistics before. I've also met autistics who do not have violent outbursts.

It is rare however to see a high functioning autistic to write a well structured and empathetic passage like that without editing it for several hours. Given you wrote that passage in under an hour, clearly you were misdiagnosed.

Because he obviously has never thought about this issue before now, right? It didn't affect or influence him in any way prior to this story being posted.

When you have a mental condition and people tell you they just don't believe that you have it, it makes you question your own sanity. Your post makes a rather large assumption about someone you have never met and could be detrimental to the person it's aimed at. Apparently he's not the only one that has problems with emathy and filtering his output...

Autism is a real condition with real people and families who need real help in dealing with it.

The way it's been trivialised into a mild personality quirk by self-diagnosed "autistics" and over-eager pediatritians is doing nothing but interfering with help getting where it is needed.

Being the most popular guy in the school is not normal, it's a profound gift. For most of us on this site, myself included, learning to make friends, fit in, use body language was one of the hardest parts of our lives. That does

And yet I'm going to assume that CajunArson is not your real name. You frankly dont seem to understand what the word "privacy" means since none of the items you list equate to being "good for privacy".

I'm well aware that the Government or hackers* could compromise Slashdot and find out who I am. I also don't care. I can also lie to you about who I am on Slashdot. Assuming you use the handle "Kenja" on any other online forums I can probably show you fun-filled research papers from people who are really good at data mining who could probably track you down with a very high probability just based on the content of your publicly-available posts and some educated cross-reference guessing. It'

Don't confuse lack of authentication with privacy, they ain't the same thing.

The vast majority of people don't give a flying fuck about whether or not someone can "theoretically" ID them. I harbor no delusions that, with Slashdot's and my ISP's cooperation, a suitably-empowered government agency could easily ID me. I've certainly said enough about myself on here to confirm even a "close enough" guess.

Most people just care that when their future employer googles their name, their postings on MyLittleFilly.xxx don't go to the top of the list.

Let's give a 5 year old a really sharp knife. With a really sharp knife, the kid can't delude himself, thinking it's a toy when it's not. With a really sharp knife in his hands, the danger is rubbed in his face so he doesn't forget it, ever, after he stupidly puts the blade in his mouth on an assumption that it's a popsicle. Not.

The flaw in your argument is this: There will always be a whole bunch of inexperienced people on the internet, and they shouldn't be penalized permanently just to teach them a les

My 6 year old niece has been surfing the net, and knows how to do things like set up Admin privileges for users in Windows... and that was over a year ago. To kids born recently, they know of no life without computers or the internet. It isn't just an essential to them... it's the way life is. I've warned my brother that if she encounters the content filter, she would probably just remove it, and may have already.

With the ability to use nicknames, you can delude yourself into thinking you have privacy when you really don't. With a real-name policy you are having your lack of privacy rubbed right in your face so you don't forget it and do something stupid under an "assumption" of privacy.

...

... The Internet was never anonymous.. it's just that the Internet made it (and still makes it) difficult to verify that the other person at the end of the pipe is actually who he says he is and isn't lying to you. Don't confuse lack of authentication with privacy, they ain't the same thing.

You think this violates the "anonymity" of the Internet? The Internet was never anonymous..

Really? Somehow I had this sneaking suspicion that pseudonyms allowed people to make the choice of anonymity or not. Oh wait, you're saying they're not the same thing. But you're wrong. The lack of an actual identity and authentication is the core of being anonymous.

Never mind that people value nicknames more than they value their real names on forums, people have a higher intrinsic value for a unique username.

Who here knows what my "human legal name" is? Everyone online knows me by either my Norwegian nickname (Skaperen) or my Swedish nickname (Skapare). There's no point in getting on Facebook at all unless I use these names. Well, OK, I do have a couple other nicknames.

I don't think a law should force them to accept nicknames. This should happen when Mark quits being stupid.

Here? Nobody. But now EVERYBODY knows that it isn't your real name.On Facebook, it will be your mom, or some old friend from school who you befriended on Facebook, but who still holds a grudge and reports you.I used to have an account, but there was NOTHING I liked about the daily drivel of the what people were doing. Finding old friends? There is a reason they are not my friends anymore. People part their ways for various reasons and the only things I got out of

Your "real name" is whatever you decide to call yourself. You cab have more than one depending on the circumstances in which you use it.

What Facebook wants is your "official name", as in what your tax office / passport agency knows you as. This, however, is a legal fiction purely for officialdom and has nothing to do with any site that functions as a social environment without connection to records of citizenship. So they can sod off.

I've been using "Ã-yvind SjÃlvklart" ("SjÃlvklart" is Swedish for obviously) since someone registered on Facebook using my e-mail address sometime in the middle of last year and they haven't closed my account yet. And they didn't mind that I changed my name to that (the person who registered with my e-mail used another surname). It may be that you only get into trouble when someone reports you and a human at facebook actually looks your account. I personally do not mind if they close my accou